May 28, 2007

Frankie's Fastball

Whirrrrrr... -bam!Whirrrrrr... -bam!

Something strange happened in the fast-pitch cage at Frankie's on Saturday night. The first ball dropped into the chute but didn't come out. Then another ball passed through a wormhole and went bam! into the backstop.

Honestly, I had no idea what had just happened. I heard the noise but never saw the pitch. Same thing happened on the second ball, but then I adjusted my eyeballs to higher frames-per-second resolution, and by pitch ten or twelve I almost knew when it was time to swing.

After that, medium-pitch looked a whole lot closer to sane.

Frankie's Fun Parkon TW Alexander Drive just south of Highway 70(just east of Brier Creek)

Comments

Frankie's doesn't have a parking problem though. And once you get out of your car, you can get into their go-carts. But the best thing they have is Stargate and Robotron tucked in among their videogames of martial arts and cartoon characters.

Once, at Frankie's, I beat this 10 year old kid in go-carts and felt really good about that. Then I was playing Stargate, shooting aliens with lasers, like a proper video game should always have you do. The kid was watching, saying, "What are you doing?" I tried to explain. Well, see, you have to keep the green things from picking up the humans walking on the ground. And if they do and you shoot the alien, then you have to catch the humans as they fall . . .

"What is it? I don't get it," he interrupted.

It didn't make sense to him. None of the characters were also on cereal boxes, none had a name, there were no secret moves or ripping someone's head off. Just that sublime geometry unique to the Defender/Stargate oeuvre.

Hmmmm. But doesn't the nearness of the shopping center rub off on the go-carts and then you're forced to try to park go-carts while moms in big-ass go-cart SUVs try their best to make you have zero visibility?